- Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds – The Daily Beast – Fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she acts like she’s not interested is, generally, something that ends badly for everyone involved. But it’s a narrative that nerds and nerd media kept repeating.
- #GameOverGate (with images, tweets) · strictmachine · Storify – Zoe Quinn blows #GamerGate wide open.
- Timothy Snyder’s Lies | Jacobin – In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Hitler and Stalin are one and the same. And the partisans — Jewish fighters included — only encouraged German crimes.
- Whirling Nerdish: Asthma and THE MIRROR EMPIRE – I’m particularly interested in how Hurley handles this character because all my life, I was told by movies and TV that people with asthma were nerds. They were geeks, dweebs, losers. Pathetic little wastes that fly into a wheezing, gasping fit when things get difficult while, meanwhile, the HERO goes and kicks the bad guys ass and handles his shit.
- A few disjointed thoughts on other cultures and diversity in SFF – Aliette de Bodard – Researching another culture is freaking hard work, PLEASE do not undertake it lightly (and when I say “freaking hard work”, I don’t mean a few days on Wikipedia, or even a few days of reading secondary sources at the library). And PLEASE do not think you’ll be exempt of prejudice/dominant culture perceptions/etc. No one is.
- Public Domain Super Heroes – Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book, comic strip, film, literary, pulp, mythological, television, animation, folk stories, etc… Characters in the public domain fitting in genres such as the masked vigilante, caped crusader, villains, scientists, magicians, robots, jungle lord, and their supporting characters.
- Pioneer winners — Butler: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom – “There certainly seems to be something of a boom. To a certain extent these things are always artefacts―there’s no objective criteria by which one can judge ‘boom-ness’ (boomitude? boomosity?―so the fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on”
Articles with the Tag comics
Your Happening World (June 15th through June 16th)
Blog fodder for June 15th through June 16th:
- Activists warn of trans suicide risk in England as surgery delayed | Gay Star News – Activists have claimed the time for trans people to get male to female gender reassignment surgery has skyrocketed in England from seven months to three years.
- David Brothers: Quitting the Big Two – Changing those habits takes effort, which leads me directly to why it isn’t difficult to stay away from the Big Two these days: I succeeded at changing my thinking. Wednesdays aren’t new comics days any more. I don’t read comics news sites when I can help it. I discover new comics via word of mouth or Tumblr. I unplugged in a way that let me maintain my decision instead of waffling and crumbling.
- BBC News – Study: Deforestation leaves fish undersized and underfed – Deforestation is reducing the amount of leaf litter falling into rivers and lakes, resulting in less food being available to fish, a study suggests.
- Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present – This postcard haunts and is haunted. In 1989, its utopian promise haunted a reality that was unable to make good on it, and in turn the postcard was haunted by the increasingly dystopian qualities of reality. In 2009 this haunting-problem now haunts the present as an example of the Marxist hauntology Derrida wrote about. The problems of our imagined Utopias and Dystopias haven’t gone away – the postcard is a ghost of the GDR, exploding like a spectre the neat symbolic binaries we put our faith in by being both nice and nasty, wrong and right, innocent and guilty, present and absent. It’s also the ghost of childhood, of innocence personal or ideological, imploring us to know its killer, manifesting to us so as to haunt and correct injustice in the same way that ghosts traditionally do. It’s a poignant lie about reality and reality is a poignant inadequacy compared to it.
- German tank problem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – In the statistical theory of estimation, the problem of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement is known in English as the German tank problem, due to its application in World War II to the estimation of the number of German tanks.
Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th
Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th:
- Son of Blade « The Hooded Utilitarian – Seibles told my class that he saw the character as an “emblem of alienation,” a metaphor for what it feels like to be black in the U.S., to feel “both American and not.”
- Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK | Global development | theguardian.com – A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.
- Some Wonderful Kind of Noise: Star Wars: Star Wars first impressions – What watching Star Wars for the first time feels like in 2014.
- Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF | Antariksh Yatra – The best speculative fiction, like travel, does that to you – it takes you to strange places, from which vantage point you can no longer take your home for granted. It renders the familiar strange, and the strange becomes, for the duration of the story, the norm. The reversal of the gaze, the journey in the shoes of the Other, is one of the great promises of speculative fiction. Much of the time it doesn’t deliver, however. Much of the time you get to go to other worlds with your feet firmly encased in your own shoes, carrying around your perspectives and prejudices as though you had never left home.
- War of the worlds: who owns the political soul of science fiction? | Books | The Guardian – Myriad militaristic SF books and films suggest the most interesting thing to do with the alien is style it as an invading monster and empty thousands of rounds of ammunition into it. But the best SF understands that there are more interesting things to do with the alien than that. How we treat the other is the great ethical question of our age, and SF, at its best, is the best way to explore that question.
- Netherlands Armed Forces Order of Battle 1985 –
Blog fodder for June 5th through June 7th
Blog fodder for June 5th through June 7th:
- From Best To Worst: The Mitfords | Bibliodaze – Every history geek has some sort of fascination with the Mitfords. It’s like being an American politics nerd and obsessing over the Kennedys, it’s practically required.
- Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. | Pearls Before Swine – Like at one point when I wanted to change a line of dialogue he wrote, I prefaced it by saying, “I feel like a street urchin telling Michelangelo that David’s hands are too big.” But he liked the change. And that alone was probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.
- To what are “contrarians” contrary? | An und für sich – The contrarian takes the counterintuitive position that mainstream opinion is under constant attack, that the ruling class is the underdog.
- Heroines – Distaff versions of well known comics heroes…
- Mostly I write these just to make up names for comic book series. – This going to go so wrong at some point in the not too distant future
- From the Heart of Europe – Ireland’s babies mass graves roundup – Roundup of links about the discovery of mass graves in Galway
“Everybody dies someday – At least I saw Provence first”
There’s nothing I don’t like about Natalie Nourigat’s Don’t let fear stop you from traveling. The story, the message, done without preaching, the cute characters, the artwork. What I especially found impressive is how well it looks even on the small screen of my mobile phone, still easily readable (and loaded relatively quickly as well).
It’s interesting how text heavy this strip is. Nourigat makes full uses of captions, thought balloons and all the other comics paraphernalia the modern superhero strip has rejected as not serious enough. Yet here Nourigat tells the story mainly through captions, only occasionally talking directly through the reader, transitioning seamlessly between the two, as above. It’s a technique you see a lot in diary and non-fiction comics (Joe Sacco’s work e.g.). Done wrong, it can be stilted, unnatural and dull, but Nourigat makes it work, knowing when to use normal dialogue instead. You don’t normally notice lettering in comics, but there are a lot of regular comics that could use Nourigat’s lettering here as an example of how to do it well.
Nourigat’s artwork is clean with crisp, clear lines and an excellent use of colour, especially background colour. Whenever she’s able, Nourigat drops any background details from her panels, using single slabs of colour instead. this of course helps to make them more easily readable in a smaller format, making the foreground characters “pop” out even on a mobile phone. It also helps to distinguish “story” panels from “commentary” panels; everytime she herselfs appears to talk directly to the reader, it’s against a solid single colour background. She also uses these colours to indicate moods, as above, where the colour slowly changes from light to dark.
What I only really noticed once I started going over this story again for this post is the way she simplifies her drawings where needed. Her characters have, big, expressive eyes in the larger, closeup panels and just dots in smaller and action orientated scenes. Mouths become simple lines or ovals,figures are reduced to a few lines. Sometimes she does it even in the same panel, with the viewpoint character having normal eyes etc and background figures sketched in. Again, it makes it easier to read on smaller screens and makes the story less busy in general, helping to guide the reader to what’s important, rather than overwhelming them with unnecessary detail.
In short, this is an incredible showcase for how to draw comics for the modern internet and it’s impressive enough I bought a couple of her books online.